Perfect Labor Storm 2.0 is a blog that highlights workforce trends, demographic shifts, and human resources changes that will change the way employers do business.

December 01, 2010

In the days before social media, good news traveled fast, bad news travelled faster. Today, good news still travels fast but bad news travels … let’s just say word-of-mouth advertising has become world-of- mouth on steroids. For those businesses still relying on customer comment cards and surveys to monitor customer satisfaction, that strategy is as anachronistic as sending an urgent message by telegraph.

In this post, the final installment of my Hard Rock Café customer service saga, I’ll repeat two of the five lessons that far too few businesses appreciate. One is an old message that I’ve paraphrased: “Hell hath no fury like an upset customer scorned.” The second lesson is really a corollary to the first, don’t underestimate the power of social media.

If you’ve been following my story, I was up to the part where we confronted a manager at the Hard Rock Café in Atlantic City about how she handled the attempted theft of my wife’s purse.

I sensed as she walked away that she felt satisfied in the way she handled the situation. Unfortunately we were not. She obviously didn’t appreciate the power of social media and with that naiveté fully underestimated the damage that can be done by “an upset customer scorned.”

Immediately upon our return home, my wife told her story on Facebook. Within minutes, she received comments from nearly a dozen friends, who likely shared the story on the walls of their friends. That’s the power of negative word-of-mouth advertising and follows closely the rule of thumb that one unhappy customer tells 13 others.

While effective, that’s naïve and 20th century thinking. If you haven’t accepted the new reality, let me be the first to break the news. If you are in business and you have customers, you better be listening all the time and ready to respond promptly because “hell that no fury like a customer scorned.”

My wife suggested that I compose a letter to Hard Rock’s management “because I write so well.” But no way was a letter going to get Hard Rock’s attention. Instead I went straight to Facebook and posted our complaint on Hard Rock Café’s wall. The audience: I reached nearly 1.7 million people just on Hard Rock’s page alone with a few keystrokes! And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Because a Facebook business profile is visible to non-Facebook subscribers, the potential reach is hundreds of millions of people. That’s a far cry from one person telling 13. What’s more troubling for a business like Hard Rock when a customer wants to broadcast his bad experience? What happens on the Internet stays on the Internet. With a letter or email, the complaint gets sealed far away from the maddened crowd.

At this point, many owners and executives might be savoring their decision to ignore Facebook and the like in order to avoid receiving negative comments. Not only is that just plain dumb, it will come back to bite them big time.

Had Hard Rock Café not had a Facebook page, I would have gone straight to one of their competitors and posted my experience on their walls. Don’t believe me. Do a search on Facebook and read how dissatisfied Toyota customers reacted after they were ignored for weeks after the gas pedal incident a few months ago.

Next I would have visited Yelp, a social networking site that allows consumers to share the experiences they've had with local businesses. The potential damage? Yelp is the 49th most popular website in the United States. Or I could have posted our bad experience on Yahoo Travel, the 3rd most popular site in the U.S. and 4th most trafficked site in the world (according to Alexa).

Hard Rock is lucky too that I’m not 30 years younger. While quite adept at navigating the digital world, my mindset is still framed in a Baby Boomer world. Had I been a digital native, a Millennial raised when PCs and the Internet were mainstream, I likely would have been writing on Hard Rock Café’s wall from the restaurant, not my office 100 miles away over 24 hours later. Young adults are conditioned to text quickly and share instantly. It’s part of their DNA. They share opinions freely and use social networking in interesting ways. They … and their technologies… are changing the face of customer service.

Are you getting the picture? It doesn’t matter whether your business has created a social media marketing strategy or not. If you haven’t done it intentionally, your customers and competitors are likely doing it for you. Do a quick search about your business, your products, and your industry and you will find conversations about you somewhere on the Internet using one of the hundreds of social media sites available to anyone at anytime. No news is not good news anymore. If you aren’t hearing your customers talking, you’re just not listening.

But I digress. I posted my comment about Hard Rock on Facebook at 9:12 AM. By 9:55 AM, I received a comment from the Hard Rock. Now that’s good service.

I accepted their invitation to “friend” them and within a few hours received a lengthy and sincere apology from the assistant manager. What grabbed my attention was that our situation was being used as a training exercise for their managers and staff. Management got it right even if the manager on duty didn’t. It wasn’t only my wife’s purse and personal belongings at stake that night…but our safety and comfort along with all the other customers.

The manager and I exchanged a few private messages. I then received a personal call from the assistant manager. While a few words and gift cards don’t erase the bad experience from our memory, Hard Rock Café’s customer service recovery plan, which obviously includes social media monitoring, stopped further damage in its track.

In fact, they might have turned lemons into lemonade for some folks. In a world where bad customer service is the norm, a good recovery story creates good will. If nothing else, a response to a complaint with some attempt to resolve it shows your customers that you are listening. And listening to customers is a proven way to retain over 80 percent of your customers. I’m not sure we’ll go out of our way to visit another Hard Rock but we certainly won’t avoid it either.

For companies dependent on loyal customers of all ages, social media is shaking up how consumers make decisions and how technology announces them. All of this can create tremendous business stress as well as value when organizations use it effectively.

November 29, 2010

In my last post, I described an example of a very bad customer service experience my wife and I experienced just over a week ago at the Hard Rock Cafe in Atlantic City. I'm happy to report that the assistant manager responded promptly to my complaint on the Hard Rock Facebook Wall and followed it up with a phone call.

In today's world where most businesses tend to make excuses or ignore their customers, I'm pleased to say at least one Hard Rock Cafe manager differentiated himself. This incident offers many important customer service skill lessons for business. Here are what I believe are the top 5 lessons learned. What do you think?

1. It’s the experience, stupid. Guests will tolerate even mediocre food if the experience is good. We have many choices when we dine out but find ourselves choosing just a few. What differentiates our favorites from the rest aren’t cheap food and drink. It’s the comfortable feeling we get when we’re greeting as “family” or “special guests” every time we visit. Likewise, we’ve never returned to restaurants that had outstanding cuisine but lousy service. In this case, the manager ignored our experience and put her attitude and work operations ahead of visitor safety and comfort.

2. Be proactive. Employees should be on the lookout for dangers and risks for their guests. Although my wife’s purse wasn’t in the open, it wasn’t secure either. Some might argue that it’s not the restaurant’s obligation to ensure that guests protect their personal belongings. But it should be their responsibility to ensure our visit is uneventful, if not enjoyable. We’ve been guests in other restaurants where the wait staff or host scanned the floor, then stopped by the table to recommend that we hide our personal belongings and remove the “easy target” sign from their backs. It’s not a perfect system or a guarantee but we always appreciated that the restaurant was looking out for us and creating a safe environment - even for just a few minutes.

3. Seize the moment. Don’t wait for a customer to complain. For me this one’s a no-brainer. What could have turned into a major inconvenience and ruined weekend worked out thanks to the observant guest at the next table. For just a moment, he was a “hero.” The Hard Rock Café staff blew one of those rare opportunities to recognize a guest for going above and beyond. The good will and positive press generated by such a moment would have far exceeded any disruption to a manager’s busy schedule or loss of a few dollars by comping their meal. Instead the “hero” walked out quietly, and we left angry and unhappy…with a negative story to tell.

4. Don’t underestimate the power of social media. To paraphrase, "Hell hath no fury like an upset customer scorned." In the past, it was said that a person would tell 3 other people about a good customer service experience…and 13 about a bad one. Today, you can add a few zero’s to the bad story scenario. In the past, I might have written a letter to the General Manager or CEO of Hard Rock Café. Today, all I needed to do was post my complaint to a social networking site like Facebook and user-review site like Yelp. Instead of 13 people hearing about the bad experience, my potential audience reached hundreds of millions with a few keystrokes. What’s worse is that what happens on the Internet, stays on the Internet. A bad experience posted on the Internet doesn’t go away after it’s resolved, but lingers on the Internet ad infinitum. Don't ignore this new reality. Thanks to social media, the company no longer controls the brand; customers do.

5. To err is human, to recover divine. An apology is a good way to have the last word (Author Unknown). One of the most frequent questions I get when speaking to business people about social media is “what should we do about negative comments posted on our blog or social networking site.” My response: thank them! A study of why customers switch companies revealed that only 4 percent of dissatisfied customers complain. For every complaint, 26 more customers were unhappy. Worse than that, from 65 to 90 percent of the unhappy but non-complaining customers would never buy from the company again. Social media can be a very valuable customer service recovery strategy. A study for Travelers Insurance a few years ago showed that persuading people to complain could be the best business move a company could make. While only 9 percent of the non-complainers would buy from that company again, 82 percent would buy again if they complained AND the company resolved the problem. Even for customers who did complain but whose problem wasn’t resolved, more than 50 percent were willing to give the company a second chance.

Good customer service starts with attitude. All the training in the world won’t save an employee with a bad attitude. And a positive service attitude can’t be trained. But a good customer service strategy can turn a good employee with a positive attitude into a great one and maybe – just maybe – help a company successfully recover and retain a customer from a bad service experience.

November 24, 2010

In an economic time when a customer is your most valuable asset, bad customer service is like a cancer. If a manager at the Hard Rock Café in Atlantic City is representative of the health of that business, then that restaurant’s prognosis is terminal. (But thanks to the intervention of the assistant manager Todd following my post on Hard Rock's Facebook Wall, it looks like the restaurant might be on road to customer service recovery. More on that in a future post.)

During our dinner this past Saturday, my wife’s purse was stolen…or at least that’s what one restaurant guest attempted to do. Thanks to a very observant and quick thinking young man at the next table, my wife’s purse was retrieved intact.

The tables were very close together. A middle age couple apparently squeezed between the tables. We didn’t think anything about it because customers and wait staff were doing it all the time. But the would-be thief managed to kick the purse out into a clear spot where she could bend over to pick it up. Fortunately the young man at the next table observed the woman carrying two purses. He bent over and asked my wife if she had had a purse on the floor. When she noticed it was missing, the young man in his late 30s or early 40s ran after the woman. My wife followed and I followed her.

Our friends at the table notified the waitress, who in turn notified the manager. The manager supposedly called security and police but neither ever showed up. After a short run down the boardwalk, we confronted the woman who acted like she didn’t know she was carrying this second purse. Of course, my wife’s purse looked like a suitcase compared to the other one she was holding so an innocent mistake wasn’t likely. She handed the purse back with all the contents intact but still no police or security. She and her friend took off and we returned to the restaurant.

Never did security or the police or the manager ever come to our table to follow-up or apologize for the inconvenience. Worse, no one from the restaurant even thanked the young man. We notified the waitress that we wanted to pick up the couple’s check. She seemed surprised we would offer to do that. I’ll notch it up to youth and lack of experience in these matters, but one might think that a staff with good customer service skills and training might report that to the manager and suggest the restaurant might want to do something for their customer “hero.” But no, they just ignored it.

Following the return of the purse, we resumed our dinner and for the next 45 minutes waited for security or the manager to visit. Nothing, nada, not a peep. Before leaving the restaurant, we asked to speak with the manager. She told us that “we handled the situation well and thought we wanted to keep it private.” Yea, right. When we told her that we paid for the guests’ dinner who chased down the thief, she told us, “she would have offered to pay for their drinks, but not their dinner.” Of course, she did neither and didn’t bother to reimburse us either.

In the next post early next week, I'll highlight a few of the lessons a business like Hard Rock Cafe can learn from our customer service experience. But before you read them, what advice or comments would you share?